[development] Gerhard, Kjartan, Steven... please explain better

[Gerhard Killesreiter]

Robert Douglass wrote:

> In the sandbox discussion, an interesting pattern has appeared. 
> Virtually every developer who is involved with Drupal.org infrastructure 
> at a personal level (those named in the title) want to bring order to 

The actual proposal was actually brought up by somebody else and was to 
completely remove the sandboxes. I opposed this and hence see it as a 
bit ironic that you mention me first...

> the sandboxes and crowbar the "not projects" that live there into the 
> new release system. Everybody else is against this. Worse, we don't seem 
> to be moving towards agreement.

I am not that pessimistic. Most people seem to understand now that 
module development should be in /modules.

> Usually in a case like this, one side of the story isn't fully 
> understood. I have to admit that I still don't understand what is so bad 
> about the sandboxes that makes the people involved with infrastructure 
> hate them. I use my sandbox only infrequently but am very glad it is 
> there.

Why? A recent commti you did was your memcached code. Does this need to 
be in a sandbox? Shouldn't this rather be an attachment to an issue or 
even a project?

> The answer can't be "the code there is lousy" because that 
> applies to at least 200 of the projects in contrib as well (a number 
> which will rise with the new proposed changes). So what is it that makes 
> the sandboxes a thorn in the side of the people who actually have to 
> maintain the infrastructure?

Kjartan has explained that quite well.

As far as I see it there are the following use cases for sandboxes that 
don't fit the current rules:

- share some code snippet (Karoly, Goba)
- develop patches for contrib modules

Of these only the last one needs (IMO) revision control and we could 
amend the rules to allow for this. For the first use cases a file upload 
to an issue or the snippet repository in the handbook should be fine. It 
is actually better there because it can be more easily found.

> The work that goes into Drupal.org 
> infrastructure is chronically under-appreciated, and if the sandboxes 
> are a special burden that I (we) haven't recognized, it would help the 
> conversation to find that out.

They are simply uncontrollable, nobody is really accountable for the 
stuff in there etc. And most of the stuff is crap that nobody will 
understand, ie is completely undocumented and thus unusable by anybody 
but the author.

Example:

http://cvs.drupal.org/viewcvs/drupal/contributions/sandbox/yched/

I initially was delighted to find this, because there is some 
nodereference issue I need to get resolved. But what am I supposed to do 
with this? "Fisrt test commit :-)" is not a useful commit message and 
the README is only the original.

Most of the other sandboxes are similar: Undocumented, non-working, 
age-old stuff. 98% inside these sandboxes is crap not worth keeping.

Cheers,
	Gerhard